Hartford Unveils Interactive Budget Website

A new website gives the public easy access to Hartford's budget. (Screenshot From budget.hartford.gov)

Interactive: Hartford's budget now online

HARTFORD — From the $284 million spent on education to the $200,000 spent on a parking lot, a new interactive city website shows the city's operating and capital budgets in granular detail.

The website — budget.hartford.gov — was launched Wednesday. It's designed to give residents a transparent view of how Hartford spends its money, said city spokeswoman Maribel La Luz.

The site lets users explore programs in the $570 million operating budget — the fund that keeps the government running every year, including education, public safety, debt service and other expenses — and the $1.26 billion capital budget, which provides funding for infrastructure and improvement projects.

Users can drill down into each program to see how money is spent. For example, clicking on the "public works" category of the capital budget shows 179 individual "one-time" projects, ranging from $112 million for Hartford Public High School, to $152,378 for a Bushnell Park Carousel study and improvements, to a $7,550 expense at Pathways to Technology Magnet school.

The site also shows how annual expenses, including salaries and wages, have changed over the years.

All of the data are downloadable.

"Developing the city's budget is a complex intense process for city staff and the volume of information can be overwhelming to the general public," said Mayor Pedro Segarra in a release. "It's been an ongoing process to try and make city information as accessible and easy to understand as possible."

It builds on data already warehoused at data.hartford.gov, a site that offers crime statistics, financial, housing and development data, and many other data sets.

"This information belongs to the public," La Luz said. "We've been using a lot of different tools to make this information accessible, internally and to the public. … We hope if anything that this creates discussions and questions that we'll be able to answer. We make it available to give the community an opportunity to be involved with it and be informed."

As part of the budgeting process in the spring, the city holds "people's budget" workshops, two-day seminars where officials give members of the public copies of the detailed city budget and let them try to balance it.

"We got a lot of positive feedback about that, because people were able to understand this information, and it just made the budget process a lot less adversarial and more transparent," La Luz said.

The new website is part of that effort to encourage public involvement and transparency, she said.